Orphan's Triumph

FIFTY-EIGHT

“ON THREE!” Aud and I, in line with twenty others, strained against a cable spooled through a block and tackle stripped from the camp machine shop, tied to an eyelet on an ice sledge. The sledge’s runners squealed, then groaned as the great iron box crashed onto its side like a dying mammoth. The echoes died against the canyon’s stone-cold walls, even as other cars toppled by others of the three hundred volunteer shopkeepers fell into place.

We were overturning sledges so that their iron floors became parapets that blocked the canyon bottleneck from vertical stone wall to vertical stone wall. Aud set the first line of our barricade six hundred yards up the canyon, near its crest, where the thousand-foot-high walls bottle-necked down to a twenty-yard width.

That way the front line of an entire division of attacking troops, even shoulder to shoulder, could never amount to much more than sixty soldiers. And those sixty would be advancing uphill, unprotected, for six hundred yards. Meanwhile, our guys, even if they weren’t marksmen, would hunker behind cover and mow their attackers down, then mow down the ranks behind them, until we ran out of ammunition or the attackers ran out of enthusiasm.

There’s a schoolyard simplicity to infantry tactics once you remove air power from the equation.

Boom.

The last sledge toppled across the canyon like a beached whale as Aud stepped alongside me, batting dust off his long coat with mittened hands. He craned his neck, up along the canyon’s east wall, where the narrow ledge overlooked both us and the plain to the south from which the attack would come. He sighed. “There’s no point in placing marksmen above. We have no marksmen but you.”

“I’m taking a rifle and a hundred rounds up on the ledge with me.”

Aud shook his head. “Your most vital job is to destroy the flanking route, not to play at target practice. Just set the charges, light the fuses, and run. Live to fight another day.”

I looked around. Men stacked rocks on the parapets. Others cleaned weapons or unboxed cartridges. Each shopkeeper busied himself to avoid the reality that they would die in this canyon. “Nobody else seems to have an exit strategy.”

I knelt, then swung up the pack with the dynamite. Aud grasped the pack’s handle, centered the load on my back. “Jason, I know you. You intend to return from the pass, then rejoin us here. You return to the camp. If the stones aren’t delivered, this sacrifice will count for nothing. Honor me, and these men, by making sure we all died for something. Promise me that.” He laid a hand on my shoulder.

I laid my hand over his, stared up at the late afternoon sky. “I better go. The only thing I hate worse than heights is climbing them in the dark.”

It might once have taken me a few hours to make my way back north along the canyon, then east to the steep, narrow route that switched back and forth toward the ledge that overlooked the canyon, then up the trail that climbed a fifth of a mile.

By the time I not only made it to the trailhead, then climbed to the ledge, my skinned knees and elbows trembled beneath my coat’s sweaty bulk, and the cotton that had once been saliva crusted my lips, and it was midnight, according to the Tressen pocket watch I carried. The only Spooknet-capable ’Puter the Spooks would allow us I had left behind with Jude, so that he could call for pickup of the Cavorite in case I didn’t make it back.

I lay on the ledge in the dark, too exhausted to fear the sheer drop that began inches from the blisters inside my boots.

I had no heated armor to keep my fingers and toes from going numb, no helmet water nipple, no padding when I slipped and fell, and no optics to keep the dark from blinding me. I huddled in a crevasse, snugged my clothes up to keep as warm as I could, and dozed.

I woke at four a.m.

The moonless Tressel night was frigid, black, and still.

Except for a faint glow on the southern horizon that shifted position back and forth. Like a train winding north.